5.31.2010

If you love photojournalism, you should check out APAD (a photo a day) and not just because they are featuring my photo today. (Reading this later? Find the photo here, under May 31.)

APAD is a fabulous daily sampling of the best of contemporary photojournalism, direct from the photographers themselves. Often the posted photos are ones that newspaper photogs shot for themselves, or ones that didn't make the paper.

If you really really love photojournalism (and are a photographer yourself) you can join the APAD listserv. Of course, I've hit nearly 30,000 messages now in my APAD email folder; it's hard to keep up with so prolific a crowd.

Since APAD does not include captions, here is more about the photo above:

A wall of dials in the Chernobyl First Block control room once marked the depth of each fuel rod in the reactor core. Just down the hall is the burnt-out Fourth Block control room, where a combination of design flaws and human error triggered the accident during a late-night safety test. Most estimates say ninety-five percent of the radioactive materials remained on the grounds of the power plant or spread to the adjacent forest. Both were decontaminated, using the labor of about 850,000 liquidators from across the Soviet Union.

5.21.2010

It is interesting to see what different photo editors pick as a lead image for the story. I like this photo as an introduction, the way it shows something out of the ordinary. What you can't tell from this shot is that the Semikhody checkpoint has a row of about 8 radiation detection gates. As workers come out to board one of the trains home, over 1,000 workers pass through these checkpoints in a short period of time.

5.20.2010

Photos from my After Chernobyl project will be screened this weekend in Baltimore. The screening is part of Slideluck Potshow, an evening of eating beautiful food and viewing delicious art. Or something like that.